Eating the Frog

A recent discovery on my quest to optimise my personal productivity was the concept of Eating the Frog - the notion that procrastination can be beaten by tackling the thing you *least* want to tackle. Essentially the 'frog' is your most difficult task and tackling that first is psychologically key to being able to progress.

How to Eat the Frog

• FIRST THING or LAST THING on the previous day:
  • Identify your most difficult task
  • If you have two frogs to eat, tackle the more challenging one first
• Once the worst frog is DONE:
  • allow yourself the freedom to do ANY task, preferably a smaller butterfly task
    • The butterfly is ideally something you will enjoy but can be admin - booking and appt, sorting emails
  • Once the butterfly is done, identify the new biggest frog

Multi-day frogs

• If possible split bigger tasks into chunks that can be completed in 1 - 2 hours
• Longer tasks will usually get bogged down because your brain cannot take the time-out it needs, and you are more likely to hit slow-mo or start procrastinating

Ride the flow

IF you hit flow with a frog ALL RULES ARE OFF - keep going. But BE HONEST:

• ARE you really in flow, or you are you just having a lovely time on something ultimately irrelevant?
• IS this really the Frog? If not you are just in-flow procrastinating